March 19, 2019

Late last year, I picked up John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood,” which chronicles the long con pulled by Elizabeth Holmes, an entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford at nineteen to found Theranos, a company that she claimed would reinvent the biomedical industry. I was instantly engrossed—“Bad Blood” unfolds like a thriller, offering a breathless barrage of details exposing how Holmes deceived her investors and colleagues at nearly every turn. Holmes wanted to disrupt the blood test: she boasted that her company was developing a method for running hundreds of lab tests from a single drop of blood, employing a machine called “The Edison” that used nanotechnology and robotics to analyze the sample. (It never worked consistently, if at all, but Holmes first hyped, and later faked, the machine’s tests.) In just a few short years, thanks to Carreyrou’s investigations and leaks from whistle-blowers, Holmes went from Silicon Valley’s golden girl—named the youngest self-made female billionaire by Forbes—to a disgraced fraudster whose company was under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Bad Blood” does a formidable job charting the Theranos ordeal, but it doesn’t get into Holmes’s head. After reading the book, I found myself searching for clues to her true character. I Googled pictures of the C.E.O. at the height of her powers (bottle blonde, a smear of red lipstick, the same Steve Jobsian black turtleneck every day), comparing them with her look after she’d been found out (pale blue oxfords, bare face, a delicate crucifix necklace). I watched her old TED Talks and lectures and listened to the unnerving sound of her voice, a husky baritone that Carreyrou posits might have been fake. Adam McKay’s upcoming Hollywood adaptation of “Bad Blood,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, will no doubt attempt to explain its antiheroine’s motives, imposing some neat psychological arc. But, as “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a new HBO documentary from Alex Gibney, shows, the real Holmes remains vexingly sphinxlike, no better understood today than when she was in the depths of her deception.

Gibney, who has made documentaries about such cagey entities as Enron and the Church of Scientology, told me recently that the Theranos scandal was the most difficult story he’s reported, owing to the company’s atmosphere of intense secrecy and paranoia. It was only after the company fully dissolved, in 2018, that people began to speak with him. Readers of “Bad Blood” will be familiar with much of the material Gibney assembled for “The Inventor,” which features Carreyrou as a talking head. But the documentary is worth watching for the range of archival footage Gibney dug up, including some from inside Theranos’s clandestine headquarters.

We see, for instance, clips of Holmes in the ultra-modern, aggressively bright Theranos office, posing next to a large white wall she printed with a Yoda quote, “Do or do not, there is no try.” We see her give a self-aggrandizing speech to her staff about how she charmed the President of Brazil at a private dinner party, and about how Theranos’s enemies are simply jealous of their progress. We see her, in a rare moment of levity, dancing with glee to M. C. Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This” after learning that the F.D.A. had approved a minor patent, just months before the fraud revelations broke. One clip shows the making of a promotional Theranos advertisement, for which Holmes hired the documentarian Errol Morris. “I’m a fan!” Morris tells her, as she steps in front of a ring light for the director’s signature closeup shot. The unblinking gaze from her ice-blue eyes, which once telegraphed a monastic intensity, looks, in hindsight, like the mesmerizing stare of a hypnotist. In the most chilling shot in “The Inventor,” Gibney shows us a slow dissolve between two portraits of Holmes: in one, she looks serious, formidable, a person able to convince Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch that Theranos could change the world. In the other, her mouth stretches into a tight-lipped, inscrutable smile. In the end, the sequence suggests, no matter how long we look at her, we may never get the answers we’re really after.

March 18, 2019

The first RÜFÜS DU SOL song that I couldn’t get out of my head was “You Were Right,” the lead single off the Australian alternative-dance group’s second studio album, “Bloom,” from 2016. With its moody, resounding synths and unforgettably catchy refrain, it was one of my most-played songs that spring. RÜFÜS DU SOL—comprised of Tyrone Lindqvist, Jon George, and James Hunt—hails from Sydney, making music that is both heady and reflective, distinctive for its affecting vocals and masterful layering. The trio continues to deliver with its third studio album, “Solace,” released in October, on which the group’s sound has become heavier, deeper, and even more alluring.

“No Place,” the lead single from “Solace,” begins with Lindqvist’s soulful voice set against a background of softly ringing chimes. It then builds into an eerie transition, with Lindqvist’s echoing falsetto setting up the drop into the chorus, which features a pulsing bass line and the bold, punctuating synths that are RÜFÜS DU SOL’s hallmark. (This progression is most powerful when one is immersed in the song, whether with noise-cancelling headphones or on a dance floor; it often gives me chills.) Though just shy of four minutes, the song’s length doesn’t compromise its emotional force. “No Place” is both wistful and euphoric, moving from the feeling of longing for someone’s company to the release of being with him at last—as Lindqvist sings in the chorus, “There’s no place I’d rather be / I feel myself with you / There’s no place I’d rather be.” The unusual effect is to make you feel nostalgic and like dancing at the same time. The same sensation can be found elsewhere on the album, like in the simultaneously brooding and energizing “Underwater.”

In the crowded field of contemporary dance music, RÜFÜS DU SOL is a refreshing dose of contemplative, evocative originality. I’ve had “Solace” on repeat for months; each time I listen, I find something new on it to enjoy.

March 14, 2019

I can still recall the juvenile moral certitude that I felt, in 1994, upon watching the French figure skater Surya Bonaly earn second place at the World Championships, refuse to join her fellow-skaters on the winners’ podium, and then hastily remove her silver medal. The gesture seemed so petulant, entitled, French. It marked her, above all, as that worst of things: a sore loser. At the time, smarter people than me recognized Bonaly’s response for what it was: the frustration of years spent as a black skater in a world of ice princesses, of being rated inelegant by judges despite her field-lapping technical prowess, and of coming in second despite acing the most demanding routine of the competition. “It’s not right,” Bonaly said later, when confronted by a pack of journalists.

I got the chance to rethink Bonaly’s moment of protest thanks to the new Netflix documentary series “Losers,” directed by Mickey Duzyj, which combines archival footage, contemporary interviews, and clever animation to tell eight stories of athletes whose careers are largely defined by falling short of victory. Duzyj stretches the definition of the word “loser”—being the second-best figure skater in the world, or, as with the boxer Michael Bentt, the subject of the first episode, briefly the heavyweight champion, is awfully good. But the series’ great strength is the way that it forces us to interrogate familiar ideas about success and failure in sports—to consider, for example, that Bonaly’s great moment of triumph, despite winning five European championships, could have come in 1998, during her final appearance at the Olympics, when, suffering from an injury, she decided to execute an illegal but astounding backflip on the ice, drawing the ire of the judges but the adoration of the crowd. Even more persuasive are the images we see of her now, in her mid-forties, skating just for herself, all her accumulated skill and experience aged into an arresting grace. It’s a reminder of how much of what athletes do is intensely personal, and how much goes unrecorded in the official results.

In this moment, when many of the self-proclaimed winners around us are so wanting in their humanity, it’s invigorating to pass some time with people who are speaking honestly about disappointment. As a golf executive named Alain Pelillo says, about the French golfer Jean van de Velde, whose famous collapse at the 1999 British Open is tenderly recalled in the series’ final episode, “If we learn from defeat, we should pay a bit more attention to those who lose.” These nominal losers, and those who love them, say all kinds of profound and surprising things. Van de Velde talks about the impermanence of life; the ex-wife of Mauro Prosperi, the Italian ultramarathoner who survived getting lost during a multi-day race in a Moroccan desert, talks about his need to run as a kind of unknowable selfishness. My favorite bit of wisdom comes from the legendary Canadian curler Al (the Iceman) Hackner, who recalls losing the 1981 national championship in dismal fashion and then, afterward, sitting downtrodden with his teammates in the locker room. “Where would we be if we had won this game?” he remembers asking. At the bar, they all agreed. “Well, then, let’s go,” he said.

March 8, 2019

One of the pleasures of “Beverly Hills, 90210” was trying to keep up with the predicaments of Dylan McKay, played by the late Luke Perry, as the show underwent its long mutation from teen drama to soap opera. At bottom, the show was always a venue for good-looking people kissing in nice clothes, but when it began its ten-year run, in 1990, it was geared toward a family audience, its plots full of teachable moments. By 1994, the show had thrown steamy love triangles into the mix, but the formula was wearing thin. Its characters had left high school, and the staid George H. W. Bush years had ceded to the bawdy Bill Clinton years; the President was fielding questions about his underwear. (For the record, he favored briefs.) To keep its edge, “90210” veered into more adult themes, with Perry, who played the show’s bad boy, taking the greatest swerve of all. Literally—he drove his Porsche off of a cliff. Thus ensued Season 5’s “The Dreams of Dylan McKay,” one of the strangest episodes of the series—and one of Perry’s finest.

Dylan has seen plenty of hardship by this point in the show. His father, a white-collar felon, died in a fiery car-bomb explosion. He bought a gun on the black market and shot up his California craftsman bungalow in a drunken rage. And a woman claiming to be an old family friend drained his trust fund and absconded to Brazil. Now, after the car wreck, he’s trapped in a coma that his doctors describe as “a battle for the boy’s soul.” The majority of the episode takes place in Dylan’s nightmares, where his drug dealer chases him, with a massive syringe, through the scenes of his greatest defeats. In one dream sequence, he enjoys a chipper Thanksgiving dinner with his friends the Walshes, savoring their family’s stability so much that he believes he’s their blood relative, until serpents begin to swarm around the turkey and his dealer knocks at the door. At a mock wedding, his girlfriend’s voice drops several octaves as she professes to be his lost love, saying, “I am Brenda. That’s who I am; that’s who I want to be. I want to be Brenda, and I want to be your wife.” Later, he gets in the driver’s seat of his father’s car, where he’s blown up. His favorite pool hall becomes a Boschian hellscape, where he’s tormented by lust. “I’ve been with everybody in this room,” he says, laughing a vulgar laugh. Then the dealer is back—he ties off Dylan’s arm and licks the spot where he’s about to plant the needle.

It’s as absurd as it sounds—a dream sequence rooted in melodrama, its louche flourishes inspired by “Twin Peaks,” right down to Tori Spelling shimmying in a vinyl minidress. But Perry, who died this week at the age of fifty-two, somehow makes it work. As Dylan, he was always authentically tortured, his expressive, film-noir eyes carrying the role even when the writers saddled him with trite lines; in this episode, at least, they let his face do most of the acting. He was the only cast member who could look plausibly strung out. At Perry’s best, his character’s central desire—to belong to some idealized family that will never exist, in part because he keeps pushing people away—gave him emotional gravitas that matched his sex appeal. Beneath its manic plot, “The Dreams of Dylan McKay” is a testament to Perry’s gift for portraying a kind of masculine vulnerability and a reminder that “90210” wasn’t always as frothy as we remember it. When a reboot premières this fall—without Perry, and likely without the soapiness that defined prime-time dramas in the nineties—will it be willing to take risks like this one?

March 6, 2019

In 1976, a week after graduating from college with a degree in English literature, Alan Rusbridger joined the Cambridge Evening News, a regional British newspaper that employed more than seventy journalists. He got his assignment every day by consulting an A4 diary that the news editor kept on his desk, listing every council committee, health, fire, ambulance, water, and utilities-board meeting. The economics of the Evening News’ journalism were almost an afterthought: just under fifty thousand people a day paid for copies of the newspaper; local businesses bought display advertising; lucrative classified ads sustained it as well. Rusbridger went on to a decorated four-decade journalism career. In 1995, he became the editor-in-chief of the Guardian, and, by the time he stepped down, in 2015, the Guardian had one of the most-read English-language Web sites in the world.

But the business model for “proper news,” as Rusbridger calls it in his new book, “Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now,” had become a quagmire. The Guardian seems to have emerged as a rare case study of hope, finding its way with an unusual ownership structure that safeguards its enterprising journalism, a vast audience that drives page views and advertising revenue, a donation-driven membership model, foundation funding, and live events. Rusbridger’s book reads, on the one hand, as an absorbing journalism memoir by an editor who played a role in some of the biggest investigative stories of our time, including the revelations about U.S. government surveillance disclosed by Edward Snowden. But it also amounts to a kind of textbook, filled with interesting ruminations about what form journalism should take in the digital age, with explanations of the Guardian’s experiments with live blogs and its theory of “open journalism,” which is built on encouraging reader participation. The portrait of Rusbridger that emerges is that of the rarest of newsroom species—someone with genuine bona fides as a journalist and an unassailable commitment to the profession’s enduring values who also possesses the curiosity, nimbleness of mind, and openness to change necessary to navigate the relentless, shape-shifting challenges that lie ahead for media companies today. The cascading crises afflicting journalism are now rightly understood to be threats to American democracy. It is hardly an overstatement, then, to say that the health of our society depends, in part, on future Rusbridgers emerging to take the reins of our news organizations.

March 1, 2019

For the past eight Mondays, Colton Underwood, the current prize on offer on “The Bachelor,” has flung himself over a fence. The show is in its twenty-third season, and the differences between installments have been negligible—a rearrangement of roses, say, or the dinnerware. This time, though, our bachelor is a virgin, and from the get-go it seemed that his prospective sex life would serve as the season’s promotional hook. Until, that is, the show’s producers, week after week, aired a promo that teased Underwood, a twenty-six-year-old former N.F.L. player, striding up to a rather tall fence and then—swoosh!—disappearing over it. When Underwood failed for eight episodes to surmount any physical barriers (emotional obstacles notwithstanding), fans noticed. “Nope, Colton still hasn’t jumped that fence,” the Washington Post titled its most recent recap. When, we wondered, would our bachelor make the leap?

The most reliable scenes on “The Bachelor” are the post-breakup monologues, which are usually filmed in the car into which the exes climb, one by one. There, the dispatched contestant will lose it. She will tell us how scared she is that no one will ever “choose” her. “I will not allow myself to not feel chosen every single day,” Hannah B., a twenty-four-year-old beauty queen, says as she cries in the car in this season’s seventh episode. “I just feel like I’m not good enough,” one of her competitors, Demi, sobs. (Even the chooser worries about being chosen. “My greatest fear,” Underwood says, “is being in love with someone and not having them love me back.”) If we pay attention to these speeches, and look past the imperilled mascara, we’ll hear, probably, ourselves. Most of us have—while job-seeking, dating, or entering a room in which we aspire to be noticed—discovered that we are the runner-up contestants in our own lives; most of us also choose from a limited vocabulary in expressing the pain of not being “picked.” If you watch enough “Bachelor” breakup monologues, you will begin to feel a little less alone. If you watch too many, you will begin to feel a little dead.

Is there no escape from the script of competition? No getting away from the message, on and off our screens, that if we improved this or changed that, we might win the contest of life? This is the question; the jump is the answer. Watching Colton Underwood hurl himself over a fence, inexplicably, Monday after Monday, has brought on a rare feeling: hope. What is Underwood leaping over, if not the script? What is he transcending, if not his own doubt? When the show finally airs the fence vault in full, I’ll watch with some regret. I’ve enjoyed thinking of our hero on the other side—off-script, in a place, maybe, where neither he nor his viewers feel the need to ask “Why?”

February 28, 2019

Their parents are always short on money, sleep, and empathy. The nuns at their all-girls Catholic school police everything. Their classmates are quick to self-sort—the trust-funded stay away from those who are not—and their northern Irish town is caught up in the Troubles, Ireland’s sectarian conflict. Has that stopped Erin, Orla, Claire, Michelle, or James from engaging in the dickheaded solipsism that emerges when you are sixteen, restless, and convinced that you should be both showered with attention and left alone? To my delight, as a repeat watcher of “Derry Girls,” the irreverently charming hit Irish sitcom that is now on Netflix, it has not.

Set in the Irish city of Derry, in the pre-smartphone nineteen-nineties, “Derry Girls” follows four girls and their male English sidekick as they try to make it through high school and life in a cloistered town with minimal embarrassment. They fail miserably at both. Erin (my favorite of the lot) fancies herself a highbrow literary ingénue, far above the suburban plebes who don’t catch her references to Beckett. Her eccentric cousin Orla believes she is gifted at step aerobics, steals and reads Erin’s private diary, and melts things for fun. The foulmouthed Michelle has three obsessions—boys, sex, and swear words—and the frazzled Claire is always the first one to snitch on the group. James, the “wee English fella,” is attending a girls school because of the worry that boys may beat him down for his nationality; the girls subject him to an imaginative array of names, ranging from “ball ache” to “dickweed.” Together, the fivesome flail through mortifying situations of their own making, all while resenting those who have more power over their lives than they do.

This seems fitting. There’s a specific obliviousness that comes from being sixteen, when you’re swept up in anxiety but just lucky enough not to know how unkind the world can be. Derry is a town beset by soldiers, stowaway rebels, and even bombings, but these five teen-agers are busy scheming to get out of a history exam, or trying to get jobs to pay for a school trip to Paris that their families can’t afford. The hilarity lies in their righteous outrage and in the wholesomeness of their shenanigans—devoid of malice, but still spanning the spectrum of adolescent lunacy. “Derry Girls” is a reformed teen’s delight, not just for its fizzy, crackling comedy but for the tenderness with which it treats both the manic restlessness of its teen-age dirtbags and the haplessness of the olds trying and failing to keep them in tow.

February 25, 2019

We live during something of a horror-film renaissance. In recent years, the genre has supplied not just scares but thoughtful critiques of social ills. Much has been written about masterpieces like “Get Out” (2017) and “Hereditary” (2018). Before either was released, a director named Konkona Sen Sharma made her début with “A Death in the Gunj,” a sharp, lively horror film that doubles as a biting portrait of the patriarchy.

The film, which is now streaming on Amazon, opens with a corpse being placed in the trunk of a baby-blue Ambassador car. A sugary flute track plays during the scene. This is sweet, pastel horror, but it soon becomes something much more terrifying. The setting is McCluskieganj, a town in northeast India, in the nineteen-seventies, and the area is haunted by the spectre of the British colonial empire. Shutu, a troubled college student whose father has just died, is visiting his aunt’s house, where a twisted family dynamic slowly develops around him. Shutu’s cousins and their friends find increasingly cruel ways to torture him; they begin with a prank involving a séance and eventually leave him in a wolf-infested forest. There are other, more familiar tropes—“A Death in the Gunj” wants you to know that it’s a horror movie. We get a summoned spirit, a graveyard tryst, a missing child, a few jump scares, and, yes, a death—the spoiler is right there in the title.

Beneath these genre hijinks is a masterly depiction of how deep-rooted patriarchy can rot a family tree. Shutu is tormented for his crimes against masculinity: he reads and draws, is quiet and emotional, and shows fear instead of anger. “You’re so pretty,” he is told, “you could be a girl.” Sen Sharma isn’t afraid of cliché—we get a well-timed “boys will be boys”—but the film succeeds most when it strays from stale language and points to the specific ills that plague economically privileged, English-speaking Indian families. Though the women drink whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and sing Elvis songs, they are shadowed closely by misogyny, blurred at the edges but still an unshakeable presence. Every remark is double-edged, every interaction stitched with barbed wire. After a slow, simmering buildup, it is almost a relief when the water boils over the lip of the pot. In its gory, heartbreaking final act, “A Death in the Gunj” presents no cathartic subversion of power but turns out, instead, to be a cautionary tale. I found myself glad for the film’s sometimes heavy-handed indictment of violent masculinity—in those final, bloody moments, there was no mistaking who was to blame.

February 13, 2019

Last year, I picked up “Blood Water Paint,” Joy McCullough’s haunting début novel, which is about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Gentileschi was an accomplished artist—the first woman accepted to the Florence fine-arts academy—and McCullough’s tribute to her is written entirely in free verse. I happened to read the book while travelling. In each city I visited, I picked flowers to place between the pages where Gentileschi deserved the love women so rarely find when telling violent truths. When she was seventeen, Gentileschi was raped by her painting instructor, who was put on trial, in 1612, after her father pressed charges. (Women could not do so at the time.) That trial forms the center of McCullough’s narrative; we learn how Gentileschi was tortured to confirm that her story was true. But the book also recounts Gentileschi’s early years, when she was a promising artist who finished her father’s paintings, craved a mentor, and toiled under the patriarchal thumb.

McCullough began working on the novel long before #MeToo, but the parallels are hard to ignore. The book does not read like historical fiction. It teems with raw emotion, and McCullough deftly captures the experience of learning to behave in a male-driven society and then breaking outside of it. As a young girl, Gentileschi feels male gazes sinking into her back and responds by adjusting her skirt or leaving the room. “I wish men / would decide / if women are heavenly / angels on high, / or earthbound sculptures / for their gardens,” McCullough writes. Either way, women are “beauty for consumption.” After being raped by her instructor, Gentileschi’s first reaction is to lie on the floor and be swallowed by shame. Her second is to remember the love of her mother and to find strength in the stories of two Biblical figures: Judith, who slayed an Assyrian leader to save her people in wartime, and Susanna, who stood trial after two elders accused her of sexual advances. These two women would also become the subjects of Gentileschi’s most famous paintings. As “Blood Water Paint” makes clear, the artist’s triumph was not surviving the trial but transcending her pain by putting it into her work. That work endures to this day.

February 11, 2019

For Josep (Pep) Guardiola, the winningest soccer coach of the past decade, the most successful soccer tactics are simple: “Take the ball, pass the ball, take the ball, pass the ball.” His team, Manchester City, won last season’s English Premier League—where the dominant style of play is to kick and rush—with a record twenty-eight thousand passes, a hundred points, and five games to spare. This follows the passing records he broke during stints in Germany and Spain. He who controls the passing game, it would seem, controls the outcome.

In “The Barcelona Legacy,” the soccer historian Jonathan Wilson goes as far back as the first international soccer game, between Scotland and England, in 1872, to trace the evolution of this playing style. It pops up as the Netherlands’ mesmerizing “Total Football” of the 1974 World Cup, which was said to reflect the Dutch values of manipulating and conserving space; and a more recent variant is the “tiki-taka” of the F.C. Barcelona team, led by Guardiola, which won fourteen out of a possible nineteen trophies in four seasons.

The center of Wilson’s narrative is set in the Catalonia of the nineteen-nineties, where a number of coaches and players (including the adolescent Guardiola) began to refine the Dutch style. In that Eden, the golden rule was that success flowed from the beauty of the game rather than from its results. Or as the Spanish coach Juan Manuel (Juanma) Lillo puts it, “The birth rate goes up. Is that enriching? No. But the process that led to that? Now that’s enriching. Fulfillment comes from the process.” Barcelona’s success became an argument for the rule. But, just as Satan is the most engaging character in “Paradise Lost,” the mischievous Portuguese coach José Mourinho, who was an assistant coach and friend to Guardiola in Catalonia, is the book’s charming foil. Mourinho, who’s achieved huge success coaching Chelsea, Inter Milan, and Real Madrid, has no regard for the golden rule: results are the only beauty he cares to behold. The dramatization of the rivalry between him and Guardiola—first in Spain and then in England—supplies a study of beauty and competition that complements Wilson’s historical retelling and gives fans a keen, thrilling insight into the philosophy of the game.

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